Living to be 100: Still on the clock at 100

Respected Chinatown volunteer says his active life keeps him vital

Shu-Wing Mak is 99-years-old and will turn 100 in December. He lives in Yaletown and volunteers regularly at a seniors’ centre. Mak is also a newspaper columnist and author of several books, and has received a Queen Elizabeth Jubilee medal this year.

Photograph by: Jason Payne
, VANCOUVER SUN

Shu-Wing Mak is a slim, elegant man fond of Chinese opera and penning political commentary.

Not that he’s kept only to intellectual pursuits in his retirement years. He has a regular schedule of volunteer jobs in Chinatown: If it’s Thursday, it’s time to keep company with seniors at a retirement home.

“I wish to give them inspiration,” he said recently, just a few months shy of his 100th birthday. “If I can make it, they can make it.”

Looking every inch a sharply dressed businessman, Mak enjoys telling a reporter about his busy days.

“I’m just back home from work,” he says.

Mak is remarkable for his agility both physically and mentally, but his great age is becoming more common around the world. There were an estimated 180,000 centenarians in 2000, according to global population data compiled by the United Nations. That’s expected to increase 18-fold by 2050 for a total of 3.2 million centenarians.

The highest per capita rates of 100-year-olds will be in the developed world with Japan leading the way.

Projections say Japan will have almost 1 million centenarians in 2050, peaking at about one per cent of the total population.

Japan now has 37 centenarians per 100,000 population. The rate in Canada is 17 per 100,000 although Saskatchewan far surpasses the rest of the country at 31 centenarians per 100,000. B.C. beats the national average slightly at 20 per 100,000.

What drives these numbers has been the focus of research into diet, exercise, genetics and social conditions, particularly in hot spots for longevity, notably Okinawa — a prefecture comprising the southernmost islands in the Japanese archipelago — and some isolated villages in the mountains of Sardinia, a Mediterranean island off Italy’s west coast where rates of up to 50 centenarians per 100,000 have been reported.

As for Mak, he was born in China, home to the most centenarians in the world merely because of its billion-plus population.

Although China has had a relatively low rate of citizens reaching the century mark, researchers say that rate has increased with astonishing speed in recent decades.

His life began as the son of a merchant in the southern city of Guangzhou, historically known as Canton, a year after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and the end of 2,000 years of Imperial Chinese history. In the chaotic years that followed, he studied in the Confucian manner — with its emphasis on classical learning, ethical behaviour and the elevating power of education — that would eventually be denounced as counter-revolutionary under Communist rule.

Mak put his fate in the hands of the Kuomintang or Nationalist government of the day, which he joined right out of university, first in its treasury department and later as an aide to a military general.

“Because he was good not with guns, but a pen, he worked for a general,” explained his daughter Rita Mak, who translated her father’s words when English failed him during the interview.

It all fell apart for Mak, his wife Yuen Wah and two young children, when the Communist forces of Mao Zedong won control of China. They fled as refugees to the nearby British colony of Hong Kong where his degree in economics and political science was meaningless.

“When I went to Hong Kong, I had to start at zero,” he says. “With nothing.”

So from 1949 until he immigrated to Canada in 1979, Mak also became a merchant, running his own store and, like his father before him, insisting on top-notch education for his children who totalled five in all, after the birth of three more in Hong Kong. Two sons studied in England, three daughters in Canada and the U.S. All became Canadians — save Rita, who lives in California — and are now working in the U.S. or China.

While he was retirement age when he and his wife came to Vancouver to be closer to their children, Mak began his new volunteer career within months of arriving. First with the Strathcona Community Centre near Chinatown where he spoke Cantonese and Mandarin on behalf of the staff who couldn’t, then helping create a small Chinese-language library. He and his wife later started the Mount Pleasant Chinese Musical Society before her death in 2001.

His 20 years of commentaries for Sing Tao, a Chinese language daily newspaper in Vancouver, are all kept neatly dated, tucked in the plastic sleeves of a three-ring binder. Most are about politics in B.C.

Now he writes mostly for SUCCESS, the vast social service organization centred in Chinatown that is dedicated to improving the lives of newcomers. It’s a SUCCESS-run seniors’ residence that he visits each week after taking a city bus from his highrise apartment in Yaletown.

All of his volunteer work landed him a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal last year, presented for service to country and community. Next month, he’ll be feted by 400 guests at a birthday celebration hosted by his family, although his actual birthday isn’t until December.

“There’s a Chinese saying that longevity has to be accompanied by health,” he says through Rita’s translation. “Without health there would not be a lot of meaning in longevity.

“I tell the young folks in order to have health and longevity the main point is to keep active and vital mentally, physically, emotionally and socially.

“The point is not longevity itself, the point is vitality in these four areas to lead a fulfilled life.”

But what’s his secret ingredient to long life, as he is regularly asked? A special diet? Tai chi?

Nothing at all, he says, although he likes to eat rice at every meal and also boils up a herbal tonic prescribed by a Chinatown herbalist a couple of times each week.

He does seem to have a genetic advantage with a 103-year-old sister still living in Guangzhou and his only other sibling, a brother, who lived to 93 in Toronto.

Mak says he didn’t plan to live this long, but once he turned 90, he set a new goal.

“He decided to challenge himself to race with time, to challenge his own mortality,” explained his daughter.

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Shu-Wing Mak is 99-years-old and will turn 100 in December. He lives in Yaletown and volunteers regularly at a seniors’ centre. Mak is also a newspaper columnist and author of several books, and has received a Queen Elizabeth Jubilee medal this year.

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